


Petrichor

by earlymorningechoes



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 19:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlymorningechoes/pseuds/earlymorningechoes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara doesn't expect she'll ever talk to the TARDIS, that's properly bonkers. But then, she's been wrong about "bonkers" before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petrichor

     Ever since the TARDIS decided to show Clara its voice interface, she’d discovered that she didn’t actually have to physically hear the TARDIS to know what the ship was saying. She’d find herself walking down a corridor, wandering aimlessly because having a destination was a sure way for the TARDIS to have fun sending her down a maze of confusion, and a thought would pop unbidden into her head. At first she’d thought they were just random bits of her own mind, sneaking through when she wasn’t concentrating on something else, but over time they became more insistent, and they definitely had a personality all their own.

     Finally choosing to listen to one of them, she’d been directed her down a set of corridors she’d never be able to find her own way out of, and at the end she’d pushed through a heavy old trap door and found herself perched on the roof of the TARDIS as they spun underneath a galaxy pulsing with greens and blues and purples. She lay back against the roof, registering that the bigger-on-the-inside seemed to have stretched to the roof for the time being (they were in deep space, the TARDIS could do whatever it wanted), and stared upwards as the colors trailed across her body.

     The ship hummed underneath her, and a wordless happiness exploded across her as she relaxed into the horde of thoughts buzzing against the back of her mind. As the colors whirled and the ship kept steady, Clara’s own thoughts flashed with a multitude of visions, her perceptions altered by the presence of the TARDIS in her head.

 -----------

     By the time she climbed back down off the roof, finally registering that somewhere the Doctor was calling her name, they’d moved on from underneath whatever galaxy that had been and were flying instead through mostly empty space. But the great nothingness around her wasn’t as terrifying as Clara thought it should be, realizing that it was instead a sort of freedom to be wherever they chose to be.

      Lost in thought, she stopped and stared for a minute when her footsteps led her directly back into the console room. The Doctor was lying on his back underneath the main platform, and he sat up when he heard her footsteps.

     “Ah, Clara,” he burst out, “I’ve been looking for you! Anyways, you’re here now. We’re picking up a transmission from somewhere in what Earth scientists start calling Galaxy 752-39 in about 2016, not sure what it is, but it sounds interesting!” He bounded up the stairs gleefully, reaching out to her as he got ready to bang away at the unknown controls scattered across the console. At her lack of a response to his delighted outburst, he stopped in front of her, head cocked to the side in a question.

     Clara looked up at him, reaching up to tap her temple with shaking fingers. “I…know…” she began, her eyes clouding with confusion. “Everything you just said, I knew it already. Like it’s all in my head.”

     The Doctor looked askance at her and ran his fingers through his hair, unintentionally adding to its floppy tousled air. After a moment he shrugged, reached out to tap the side of her head gently, and pivoted to hurry back to the console.

     “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he hedged, beginning to flip away at switches and levers. “Nothing to worry – ”

     “Not that lever,” Clara interrupted, stopping his sentence short. “She says not that one.”

     He turned back to face her full-on, hand still poised above the lever in question. “She says?” he asked. “Who says?”

     Clara looked completely taken aback at his question. “The…the TARDIS,” she stammered. “The TARDIS says not that lever.” She sat down on the stairs, fit her elbows atop her knees, and rested her head in her hands.

     The Doctor reached for the lever again, slowly, and a storm of twitters arose from the ship. Dropping his hand, he turned again to face Clara, a look of confusion spread across his face.

     “She doesn’t usually talk to people,” he said, running his hand along the edge of the console. His eyes narrowed slightly as he watched her, and Clara looked down to find her own hand trailing against the step she sat on. Snatching it back, she stood up and moved over to the hallway that had led to her bedroom that morning.

     “I’ll leave you two alone,” she said, casting a barbed look in the Doctor’s direction before turning on her heel and stalking off down the hallway. Amazingly, she found the proper door after only one wrong hallway (and without getting dumped in the swimming pool). Collapsing on her bed, she found her ceiling had turned into a slowly-moving replica of the colorful galaxy they’d rested under earlier. As she gaped at the reproduction, a stream of thoughts began to tiptoe across the back of her mind.

     Sitting up sharply, Clara jumped slightly when she heard her own voice say stiffly, “No.” The thoughts shrank back slightly, but they still lingered where Clara could feel her own mind having a stand-off with them.

     “What do you want?” she asked aloud, rubbing her hands across her eyes. As soon as she finished the question, the soft lighting in the room flickered in time with the first thought of words she’d received: _To know you._

     Completely baffled at herself and the fact that she was currently carrying on a half-telepathic conversation with a bigger-on-the-inside spaceship disguised as a blue police box, Clara responded, “Why me?”

     The lighting flickered again, but this time the thought did not make as much sense. _My soufflé girl_ , said the box, with a titter that could only be interpreted as laughter. Finding herself chuckling along, despite her reluctance to admit the conversation, Clara stood up and headed back to the door.

     “We’ll keep talking…later…but the Doctor’s going to be so antsy if we don’t go on some sort of adventure, even if he’s miffed at us,” she said, trailing off as she hurried back up the corridor and found herself in the control room much quicker than she’d come to expect.

     She found the Doctor lying under the console again, tinkering with something unnecessary with the sonic screwdriver. Yanking on his foot, she pulled him back out, and as she directed him back up to send them off flying to another unknown galaxy, the petulance began to fade from his face. As the two stepped from the box onto a surprisingly yellow planet, Clara sent an extra backward glance at the ship before the door shut, and she was rewarded with a responding twitter from the console.

 -----------

     That evening, as a sheepish Doctor and a dripping-wet Clara returned to the TARDIS, the blue box was strangely silent. After the Doctor scurried off to some obscure recess of the ship, Clara navigated the corridors alone, becoming increasingly more frustrated as each turn revealed not her room but yet another amazing treasure she would ordinarily have been absolutely fascinated by.

     Eventually returning to the console room, Clara stomped up to the center and groaned, asking, “You grumpy old cow! Where’s my damn bedroom?” The TARDIS responded with another set of tittering laughter, and Clara dropped into the chair behind her, glaring.

     “To hell with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I started this before I saw the Clara and the TARDIS DVD extra, so this seems a bit off. But I tried to bring it in line with that, because anything shipping ClarDIS is good in my book!


End file.
